One of the goals of the Wikimedia Performance Team is to improve the performance of MediaWiki and the broader software stack used on Wikimedia wikis. In this article we’ll describe a small performance improvement we’ve implemented for MediaWiki and recently deployed to production for Wikimedia. It highlights some of the unique problems we encounter on Wikimedia sites and how new web standards can be leveraged to improve performance.

Logo as CSS background

The MediaWiki logo is defined as a CSS background image on an element. This is historically for caching reasons, because MediaWiki deployments tend to cache pages as a whole and changing the logo would thus require invalidating all pages if the logo was a regular <img> tag. By having it as a CSS background, updating the logo only requires invalidating the stylesheet where it resides. This constraint has significant implications on when the logo loads.

In the loading sequence of a web page, browsers will give a relatively low priority to CSS background images. In practice, assuming an empty browser cache, this means that the MediaWiki logo loads quite late, after most images that are part of the page content have been loaded. To the viewer, this results in the page loading somewhat out of order: images that aren’t necessarily in view are loaded first, and the logo is one of the last images to be loaded. This breaks the de facto expectation that a web page’s content loads from top to bottom.

This phenomenon extends the average duration of an imaginary metric one could call time-to-logo. The point in time when the logo appears is an important mental milestone, as it’s when a visitor has visual confirmation that they’ve landed on the right website. The issue of time-to-logo being high due to the CSS background limitation is felt even more on slow internet connections, where the logo can take seconds to appear - long after the page’s text and other images lower than the logo on the page have been loaded.

The preload link

We have been looking for a solution to this problem for some time, and a relatively new browser feature has enabled us to develop a workaround. The preload link keyword, developed by the W3C, allows us to inform the browser early that the logo will be needed at some point on the page. This feature can be combined with CSS media queries, which in our case means that the browser will only preload the right version of the logo for the current pixel density/zoom. This is essential, as we don’t want to preload a version of the logo that the page won’t need. Browser cache is also respected, meaning that all we’re doing is loading the logo a lot earlier than it naturally would, which is exactly what we were looking for. In fact, the browser now knows that it needs to load the logo a lot sooner than it would have if we displayed the logo as an <img> element without preload.

The preload links for the site logo have been deployed to production for all Wikimedia wikis. They can easily be spotted in the response header of pages that display the logo (the vast majority - if not all - pages on wikis for desktop users). This is actually leveraging a little-known browser feature where <link> tags can be passed as response headers, which in this situation allows us to inform the browser even sooner that the logo will be needed.

Link: </static/images/project-logos/enwiki.png>;rel=preload;as=image;media=not all and (min-resolution:1.5dppx),</static/images/project-logos/enwiki-1.5x.png>;rel=preload;as=image;media=(min-resolution:1.5dppx) and (max-resolution:1.999999dppx),</static/images/project-logos/enwiki-2x.png>;rel=preload;as=image;media=(min-resolution:2dppx)

Measuring the impact

To confirm the expected impact of logo preloading, we recorded a before and after video using synthetic testing with Sitespeed.io, on a simulated slow internet connection, for a large page (the Barack Obama article on English Wikipedia), where the problem was more dramatic. The left pane is the article loading without logo preloading, the right pane is with logo preloading enabled. Focus your attention on the top-left of the article, where the Wikipedia logo is expected to appear:

Unfortunately current javascript APIs in the browser aren’t advanced enough to let us measure something as fine-grained as time-to-logo directly from users, which means that we can only speculate about the extent to which it had an impact in the real world. The web performance field is making progress towards measuring more user-centric metrics, such as First Meaningful Paint, but we’re still very far from having the ability to collect such metrics directly from users.

In our case, the difference seen in synthetic testing is dramatic enough that have a high level of confidence that it has made the user experience better in the real world for many people.

The preload link isn’t supported by all major web browsers yet. When more browsers support it, MediaWiki will automatically benefit from it. We hope that wikis as large as Wikipedia relying on this very useful browser feature will be an incentive for more browsers to support it.